


tiger tiger burning bright

by m (pistachiomadeleines)



Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: M/M, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-11
Updated: 2017-02-11
Packaged: 2018-09-23 11:41:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,333
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9656012
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pistachiomadeleines/pseuds/m
Summary: The year is 2018, and Yuri's body is changing - he's beginning to lose his flexibility, even as he prepares for this year's Grand Prix series.  Meanwhile, Otabek is performing better than ever on the rink.





	

**Author's Note:**

> I wanted to try writing something more serious than my usual fluff. Here it is.

_1\. St Petersburg_

Yuri did not remember a time when his body hadn’t been in some kind of pain, but most forms of it - like the stinging of new blisters on calloused feet, or the warm ache of muscles after a hard day’s work - were familiar to him.  These pains Yuri had grown up with, had lived with for so long that it was hard for him to fall asleep on off season nights, when things got slow and lazy at the rink.

But this, this was different.  The muscles in his hamstrings pulled so taut every fiber felt as if it had been threaded through with live wires, and _still_ he couldn’t sink deeper into the jazz split that had once come as naturally to him as treading water.

“That’s enough, Yuri,” said Lilia sharply, her voice almost a snap.  “You know better than to overstretch, especially this close to a competition.”

He knew it only too well but couldn’t resist making a last-ditch effort anyway - a final exhale, and a push, and then -

" _Yuri._ ”

\- there was no point.  There was nothing to do but give up and slide back to his feet.

“I’m done, I’m done,” he snapped, without making eye contact with Lilia.  His thighs were jelly, a premonition of the hell he’d have to pay for his folly tomorrow, and he didn’t know which made him angrier - that he’d been defeated yet again by his own body, or that Lilia was right, as usual. “I have to piss,” he muttered, and ducked out of the studio, restraining himself from limping until he’d reached a safe distance from Lilia’s line of sight.

These days Lilia - and Yakov, too - monitored him hawkishly.  They were always huddled together like worried parents, whispering as they traded notes on his delinquent body and all the new ways they had observed it fail.  Yuri wondered what program changes they’d inevitably propose tomorrow, in an attempt to salvage what had been crafted with such blind and loving optimism at the start of the year.  At the rate they were going _all_ three of them were beginning to lose track of what the current version of the program really was.

He stared into the bathroom mirror as he scrubbed his hands.  There was a bit of blue sky reflected in the glass, from one of the last sunny St Petersburg days of the year.  He would walk under it briefly during his lunch break, which he liked to take at the park by the rink, maybe feed scraps of bread to the ducks.  And then he would disappear back indoors for the rest of the day, and by the time he left for his studio that evening it would be as dark as it had been when he’d set out that morning, and cold enough to see his own breath.

Yuri traced a wet finger over the gleaming stubble on his chin.  It was new, like the shape of his jaw, and the gradual lengthening of his torso, and the sudden stubbornness of joints that were beginning to develop wills of their own.  At least his eyes had not rebelled.  They were the same shade of green they’d always been.  

 _Eyes of a soldier_ , thought Yuri, and almost smiled.

***

At the supermarket that night, Yuri picked up a week’s worth of groceries - lean meats, bread, vegetables, fruit, and of course, fresh tinfuls of ultra premium cat food for his rescued calico, Kitty Scherbatsky, who wasn’t a professional athlete, and who could therefore eat whatever she liked, whenever she liked.

He stood in line beneath the fluorescent lights.  His legs throbbed and he wanted to sit, and so he flicked through instagram instead, finding comfort and mild hypnosis in the rhythmic swiping and scrolling.

Cat picture (double-tap), selfie, cat picture (double-tap), selfie, Victor and Katsudon enjoying their retirement in Hasetsu (a grudging double-tap), selfie, a clip of JJ..  A second of loading time, then quad salchow, quad salchow, quad toe loop, fuck.

Very abruptly, Yuri slipped his phone into his pocket and wheeled his cart around.

He stopped at the wine section.  He browsed for a bit as if he knew what he was doing, then settled on a pinot noir with a classy-looking label.  This, like forcing himself into a split, was short-sighted and stupid - alcohol would only worsen any muscle soreness he already had, not to mention the _calories_ in that bottle - but fuck it.  Wasn’t this the only benefit to turning eighteen?

Later, he lay in bed with a glass of wine and Kitty Scherbatsky sprawled across his stomach, and dutifully watched the training footage Yakov had sent to him for homework.  He was meant to be dissecting each spin, each jump, studying the angles and the rotations, seeing from the outside where, and why he'd gone wrong.  Except, maybe because of the wine, maybe because he was becoming a compulsive masochist, his fingers strayed on the touchpad, and soon he found himself on youtube, watching old videos of his past year competitions instead.  

Here was one of him doing the Biellmann spin, his hands thrown out as if in supplication, stretching backwards to receive his arcing leg before it drew away.  It was the first of several moves he’d eventually lost the ability to execute, and the video - its grainy, faded quality somehow underscoring the irretrievability of the grace it had captured - filled him with fury, as he knew it would.  Still he clicked on another, and saw himself on podiums, and breaking records, and then he watched videos of those records being broken again, sometimes by himself, sometimes by other skaters - as if he’d never existed at all.  

Since he couldn't bring himself to stop, he had another glass of wine, for anesthetic purposes.

_Recommended for you - Otabek Altin, Short Program 2015, GP Final Barcelona._

Here was yet another record of how the past diverged from the present.  Yuri didn’t have to click on the link to understand this, because he'd seen with his own eyes how far Otabek had come in the last three years, but he clicked on the link anyway.

He poured himself a third glass of wine.  He mulled over an idea that seemed embarrassing even with alcohol in his bloodstream, and tried to distract himself by scratching Kitty Scherbatsky behind the ears.  And then he reached across the bed for his phone and shot out a text: _I think my cat and your cat should skype sometime._

The reply came within the hour, but by then Yuri was already asleep, still fully dressed and clutching his phone to his chest.  The notification bulb glowed intermittently against his palm, gently rising and falling with the ebb and flow of his breath.  The message it was trying to alert him to simply read, _When?_   

 

  
_2\. Moscow_

He dreamt that he’d been forced into an early retirement and was working for Disney on Ice.  And he wasn’t even one of the cool characters, like Aladdin or something - he was that irritating yellow fish from the Little Mermaid, waddling around in time to Under the Sea beneath the gaudy lights in a bulky plush suit the color of radioactive waste.

In retrospect the dream was pretty funny, but Yuri didn’t think so at all when he woke up in a cold sweat from it, on the morning of the Rostelecom Cup.

***

His phone was having a heart attack in his pocket, but he could barely hear it over the thundering of the train as it hurtled through tunnels.  He ignored it, and ignored it, until the train emerged in an above-ground section and the other passengers started giving him weird looks.

Yakov was calling.  He cancelled the call.

A text from Mila: _Where are you?  Yakov and Lilia are worried sick_

And Victor: _Yuri, we haven’t talked in awhile.  Do you want to facetime this weekend?_

Lilia was calling.  His fingers trembled as they skimmed across the screen.

Yuri couldn't bear to keep looking at the mess he'd created.  For a moment he was terribly frightened, thinking of how it was only getting worse and more complicated the longer he ignored it - then anxiety traveled up its well-worn path and he began to want to hurl his phone at the ceiling instead.  Smash out all the lights with it.

He looked up, at the bored, disengaged faces of the other commuters staring at their phones or their feet as the train clattered on, and wondered what it would be like to live a nine to five life.  

Another call, chasing the last one he'd rejected by seconds.  Couldn’t these fuckers take a hint?  Yuri's thumb darted out reflexively to cancel it, and perhaps set his phone to airplane mode once and for all, and then he caught himself.  He'd seen the name on the screen. 

“Hey, what’s up?”  He said it as if they'd talked yesterday, instead of months ago. 

“Not much," said Otabek, playing along.  And then, “How are you?”

Yuri bit his tongue at the weirdness of the question.  It had never been asked like this before, so baldly, the worry in it transparent.  “You saw the livestream, I suppose."

A slow exhale, and then Otabek said, “You made it to the finals.  That's all that matters.”

“Ha, barely.  Does it really count if the competition was skating with serious injuries?"  Before he could elaborate the train doors jerked open, and Yuri realized he'd reached his stop.  The suburban skyline of industrialized housing estates rose up in the dark.  "Hang on," he said to Otabek, "I’m on the metro and this is my stop.”  He swung his backpack over his shoulders and stepped out onto the open air platform.  It was freezing out, the air damp from fresh snowfall, and he pulled his hoodie over his head before lifting the phone up to his ear.

“Still there?"

"Mhm."

"So," Yuri went on, "It looks like I’ll be seeing you in a month, thanks to the poor health of others.  Congratulations again on your record-breaking free skate at Skate America, by the way.”  Did he sound bitter?  He was actively trying not to sound bitter, but perhaps that meant that he was.

“Thanks,” said Otabek.  “We should do something when we’re in Vancouver.”

“We should,” Yuri agreed, more stiffly than he would have liked.  

The cold was biting.  It sank its feral little teeth into the parts of his fingers that stuck through his gloves, trying to bully him into hanging up, but even with the tension between him and Otabek he didn't want to, not just yet anyway.  So he slipped his hands into his pockets and balanced his phone between his cheek and shoulder as he walked.

“How’s your cat doing?” Otabek asked.

“Eating and sleeping her way through life, as usual,” said Yuri.

"The good life," said Otabek.

"It is.  By the way, she only answers when I call her by her full name, so thanks for the suggestion.”

Otabek's laugh, when it came after a slight pause, was a sudden expulsion of breath, relieved almost, as if he hadn't expected to find himself laughing.  “Also,” added Yuri, gaining momentum now, “Anna Karenina is a very boring book, and you can have it back when I see you in Vancouver.”

And finally, release.  At this change of topic, Otabek was laughing again, properly this time, and promising to send Yuri music instead of books, and they kept talking about cats, anything but skating, really, as Yuri made his way slowly down sidewalks no one had bothered to shovel, towards the apartment complex where his grandfather had lived since before he was even born.

That night, he sat by the gas stove in his grandfather’s kitchen, at the rickety old table piled high with yellowing newspapers, and stuffed his mouth with pirozhkis as the tiny apartment filled with the smells of sizzling oil and cooking meat - because fuck it, his body had proven that it would follow its own design, regimented meal plan or not.

And later, when Nikolai had gone to sleep and drunks had begun to cry out in the night from the void decks and the playground below, Yuri curled up in his childhood bed.   His phone lay uncharged and buried deep within a pile of clothes on the other end of the room, and although Yakov and Lilia were probably running around Moscow thinking he was dead, he didn’t return their calls, or anyone's calls, till the next morning.

 

  
_3\. Vancouver_

When Yuri watched Otabek step out onto the rink for his Free Skate on the last day of the Grand Prix Final in Vancouver, his first thought was, _here we go again._

The music started up, a plaintive, meandering violin solo, and at first Yuri was fine - his vitals were normal, he could think clearly - and then, along the way, before he was even fully aware of it, the same sorcery that had taken place during the Short Program happened, and by the time the full orchestra had joined in, everything inside Yuri had collapsed into a knot.

Somewhere in that knot of emotion was pride - he was fiercely proud of his friend for being capable of these enormous jumps that were as powerful as they were precise, for being able to draw from impossible reserves of strength to perform them not in isolation but in dizzying succession.

Somewhere in there, as much as he tried to suppress it, was bitterness.  He had been surpassed, and it was enough to make him want to vomit.

But mostly Yuri just felt sad, and small.  He thought of his own mediocre program, which had been pared down to almost nothing by Yakov and Lilia's panicked revisions, and which he’d performed earlier to lukewarm applause.  Now, more than ever, he keenly felt the distance between where he was, and where it was possible to be - and it was the difference between walking and running, between running and flying.

“Jesus Christ,” murmured Yakov when the music had finally died.  Otabek remained beneath the spotlights, defiantly holding his final pose even past the point where it mattered, as the audience rose to its feet in waves around him.    

“I did not breathe once during those four and a half minutes,” declared Lilia.

Yuri clapped furiously for his friend, and he clapped again as the results were announced and Otabek claimed his gold medal.  He made his way towards the podium, even though he knew better than anyone what would happen before he could get there - a swarming mass of reporters and sponsors and screaming fans converged around Otabek almost instantaneously, sealing him in all their sound and flashing camera light.

Yuri was left hovering around the edges.  He made an attempt to push past these people, but they - who’d always been the adoring and never the adored - were more practiced at it than he was, and he found himself thwarted at every turn.  Fifteen minutes later, he was further away from Otabek than when he’d started.

He shrugged off his Team Russia jacket and went for a walk instead.

***

It was warm in this temperate city on the Western seaboard of the North American continent, hardly a winter, and Yuri kept walking.  His legs were killing him, but he knew if he stopped he would be left with all of his thoughts.  And he really didn't want to think about not having placed for the first time in his entire career, and so he walked past his hotel, past all the restaurants he’d eaten at, and into unfamiliar territory.  He walked till he reached the waterfront, and then, because there was nowhere left to go, he sat down on a bench.

The view from here was pretty.  There were boats in the harbor, and ice-capped mountains beyond, and pinpricks of city light rising up the foothills in the dark.  Yuri drew his feet up onto the bench and hugged his knees to his chest, and thought of the dozens of cities he’d been to since he'd started skating, and how little he remembered each of them.  All the docks he'd ever sat at blurring into one.  It was a shame - he wished he could have held on to the beauty he'd seen.

Yuri sat on his bench for some time.  He paid no attention to passers by, or to the traffic as it came and went.  He thought nothing of the motorcycle that eventually pulled up beside the docks, idling for a long moment in the shadows before the engine fell quiet and the headlights went out.

When there was movement on the bench beside him, he was so startled he nearly cried out.

“How the fuckdid you find me?”

“Instagram,” said Otabek gravely, unbuckling his helmet and setting it on his lap.  “And then, because you didn’t add a location to your post, I had to ask JJ to guess where you probably were.  You know, cos he’s Canadian.”

“French Canadian,” Yuri pointed out.

“JJ said the same thing, but he figured it out eventually.”

Yuri grunted.  He said nothing and there was silence between them for a moment, until it occurred to him that he’d forgotten the obvious.  “Hey, congratulations,” he said as soon as he remembered, “I should have told you earlier, but the crowds…”

“My first gold medal,” said Otabek, staring out into the horizon.

“It won’t be your last.”  It hurt to say it, because he meant it. 

“Maybe,” said Otabek.  Then, turning back towards Yuri, he asked a question he’d been asking a lot lately, almost every time they spoke.  He said, “How are you?”

If it had been anyone else asking, the question would have been met with sarcasm, or blunt anger.  But it was Otabek asking - Otabek, who’d enlisted the help of terrible JJ and ridden his motorbike across Vancouver just to find him, and who, Yuri suddenly realized, was missing out on the banquet just to sit with him on this bench in the middle of nowhere.  

Yuri did not have it in him to be mean to Otabek.  He told the truth, instead.  He said, “To be honest I’m a little burnt out.”

That warmth radiating onto the back of his hand - that was Otabek’s hand, wasn’t it?

Yuri glanced down, and glanced up again.  

He was met with a wide-eyed, open-mouthed look of terror, as if Otabek had only just realized what he’d done.  It was the cutest thing Yuri had ever seen.

So, without moving his hand from beneath Otabek’s, Yuri leaned across the bench and kissed him.

 

_4\. Somewhere above the Atlantic_

The whatsapp message, part of an incoming tide of texts and missed calls, lit up his phone screen as soon as he’d managed to connect to the plane’s wifi on the flight back to St Petersburg.  He ignored the rest, and saw that it had been sent just a little after the plane had taken off.  It read, _Come stay with me in Almaty_.   _We could go skiing in the Alatau mountains.  Also, my mother wants to meet you._

Yuri gawked at that last line.  You _told her already???_

The reply, which came earlier than he’d dared to hope, made him smirk a little.   _No!_   

Followed by, _She’s been asking to meet you for a while now_ , which only served to turn his smirk into a snicker.

He texted back, _I should be able to take a couple of weeks off.  I’ll talk to Yakov and let you know._

And then he locked his phone and looked out of the window.  At the sky, and his own reflection in the plexiglass, suspended above the clouds in the deepening twilight.  Tired-looking, but happier than he'd been in a long time, he thought - and even though nothing was resolved, he intended to keep on being happy, for as long as he was allowed.

He’d never tried skiing before, but it had always looked like fun.   

 


End file.
